Book of South African - Book of Women - Mail & Guardian

the double shift. In meeting this challenge
it was a great blessing not to be the only
woman on the court and to have colleagues
such as Yvonne Mokgoro and Bess Nkabinde.
Yvonne and I were not the only parents of
young children on the court in my early
years. Johann Kriegler also had a school-age
daughter. Moreover, many of my colleagues
had grandchildren. As a result, my colleagues
were willing to eschew Saturday-morning
meetings and to recognise that sometimes I
needed to slip off to do a school lift or take
a child to the doctor. I was very fortunate to
have colleagues who were so understanding
of the importance of my mothering role.
I am conscious that in at least two ways I
skipped the hard yards. It is a lot easier to be
a member of a senior appellate court, whose
equal status is determined by law, than to
fight for your status every step of the road.
I have watched many outstanding women
withdraw from the profession because they
have not had the strokes of luck I had, or
because they have found the battles too hard,
or because their desire to spend more time at
home and with children was too strong.
I am also conscious of the special advantages
that my experience as a white Englishspeaking
middle-class woman from a professional
background gave me. Books and
debate were part of our daily lives. It was
expected that I would go to university and
pursue a career, just like my brothers. There
were no apartheid barriers in my path. The
apartheid barriers erected against black
women were high and wide. And their aftermath
is with us still.
As my career has progressed it has been a
delight to see the careers of other women in
the law also progress. Women are still underrepresented
in the profession and on the
Bench, but increasingly they are making a
valuable contribution. Perhaps we are at last
overcoming the inauspicious start.
Having had the advantage of working
closely with a very diverse group of people at
the Constitutional Court, I have learnt that we
must always remind ourselves that our identity
is complex and is not constituted by one
characteristic, such as our gender. Gender is
important in constituting identity, but so are
language, culture, ethnic background, race,
religion, sexual orientation, parental status,
age and many other qualities. As the Nobel
prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has
observed, we must be careful not to limit our
identity to one characteristic only. For if we
do, we shall diminish ourselves, and be at risk
of diminishing everyone else as well.
BIogrAPhY
Kate O’Regan served as a judge of the
Constitutional Court from 1994 to 2009.
She studied law at the University of Cape
Town as well as at the University of Sydney
and the London School of Economics and
Political Science. In the mid-1980s she worked
for a firm of attorneys in Johannesburg, where
she specialised in labour law. Towards the
end of the 1980s she joined the law faculty at
the University of Cape Town. Since her term
of office at the Constitutional Court ended
she has, among other activities, served as
chairperson of the United Nations Internal
Justice Council and as an ad hoc judge of the
Namibian Supreme Court.
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